Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

What would make it more enforceable?

I think realistically the only way you could enforce this is to legally required registration of job adverts with the government (you register the advert, you receive an ID; anyone advertising jobs without a valid ID is heavily fined), and then also require companies to register the outcome of the advert (internal hire, external hire, withdrawn, etc.).

Then it would be possible to actually identify suspicious behaviour, and you could publish stats about companies' hiring practices so candidates can avoid them etc.

then it would just be like real estate with off market listings where companies have a black market hiring pool and then just do the legal loophole steps of registering before "officially" posting and immediately hiring their desired candidate... which would probably have the shady side effect of making the policy "look efficient" without actually solving the job search problem.

I think you should focus on things you can enforce. For example, in Austria companies are required to provide certain information in job ads (eg. salary range, weekly hours, type of contract) and it's trivial to enforce because you can see if the information is there or not. I'm not sure if it helps with ghost job ads, though.

For this analogy to hold, wouldn't there have to be some way to withhold all people from applying to a job? Why would a company want to do this if it just increases the cost of hiring? What is the benefit to paying more for a workforce when you can just hire people normally.

The alternative could be like a $2000 fine per listing violation. To make it worthwhile to enforce, offer half the fine as a tax credit that can be claimed anonymously after an investigation.

They wouldn't have to register it with the government, just track it internally in the chance that they get challenged on it so they have receipts.

1) Person believes company is posting fake job listings and notes a few as evidence.

2) Person submits this to some government form similar to an FCC complaint form.

3) Government contacts the company to investigate or whatever.

They would have to register them otherwise they could very easily fake the data afterwards, and you wouldn't be able to fine people advertising jobs without IDs. Nobody would have a record of all the jobs a company had advertised.

I'm unfamiliar with off market real estate listings (not a thing in the UK). Can you describe what you mean more?

The point is if a company fills 80% of its job postings with internal hires then that's highly suss and can be investigated. I don't delaying advertising would change that?